Hestia (

minor planet designation A formal minor-planet designation is, in its final form, a number–name combination given to a minor planet (asteroid, centaur, trans-Neptunian object and dwarf planet but not comet). Such designation always features a leading number (catalog or ...

: 46 Hestia) is a large, dark

main-belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...

. It is also the primary body of the Hestia clump, a group of asteroids with similar orbits. Hestia was discovered by

N. R. Pogson Norman Robert Pogson, CIE (23 March 1829 – 23 June 1891) was an English astronomer who worked in India at the Madras observatory. He discovered several minor planets and made observations on comets. He introduced a mathematical scale of ste ...

on August 16, 1857, at the

Radcliffe Observatory Radcliffe Observatory was the astronomical observatory of the University of Oxford from 1773 until 1934, when the Radcliffe Trustees sold it and built a new observatory in Pretoria, South Africa. It is a Grade I listed building. Today, the obse ...

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

. Pogson awarded the honour of naming it to

William Henry Smyth Admiral William Henry Smyth (21 January 1788 – 8 September 1865) was a Royal Navy officer, hydrographer, astronomer and numismatist. He is noted for his involvement in the early history of a number of learned societies, for his hydrographic ...

, the previous owner of the telescope used for the discovery. Smyth chose to name it after

Hestia In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Hestia (; grc-gre, Ἑστία, meaning "hearth" or "fireside") is the virgin goddess of the hearth, the right ordering of domesticity, the family, the home, and the state. In myth, she is the firstborn ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

goddess of the

hearth A hearth () is the place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by at least a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a lo ...

. This created a problem in

, where

4 Vesta Vesta (minor-planet designation: 4 Vesta) is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of . It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807 and is named after Vesta, the ...

also goes by the name ''Hestia''. The computed

Lyapunov time In mathematics, the Lyapunov time is the characteristic timescale on which a dynamical system is chaotic. It is named after the Russian mathematician Aleksandr Lyapunov. It is defined as the inverse of a system's largest Lyapunov exponent. Use T ...

for this asteroid is 30,000 years, indicating that it occupies a chaotic orbit that will change randomly over time because of

gravitational perturbation In astronomy, perturbation is the complex motion of a massive body subjected to forces other than the gravitational attraction of a single other massive body. The other forces can include a third (fourth, fifth, etc.) body, resistance, as from ...

s of the planets. Hestia has been studied by

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

. 13-cm radar observations of this asteroid from the

Arecibo Observatory The Arecibo Observatory, also known as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and formerly known as the Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory, is an observatory in Barrio Esperanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico owned by the US National Science F ...

between 1980 and 1985 were used to produce a diameter estimate of 131 km. In 1988 a search for satellites or dust orbiting this asteroid was performed using the

UH88 The University of Hawai'i 88-inch (2.24-meter) telescope—called UH88, UH2.2, or simply 88 by members of the local astronomical community—is situated at the Mauna Kea Observatories and operated by the University's Institute for Astronomy. It ...

telescope at the

Mauna Kea Observatories The Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) are a group of independent astronomical research facilities and large telescope observatories that are located at the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, United States. The facilities are located ...

, but the effort came up empty.

Properties

Photometric observations made in 2012 at the Organ Mesa Observatory in

Las Cruces, New Mexico Las Cruces (; "the crosses") is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New Mexico and the seat of Doña Ana County. As of the 2020 census the population was 111,385. Las Cruces is the largest city in both Doña Ana County and southern New ...

produced a

light curve In astronomy, a light curve is a graph of light intensity of a celestial object or region as a function of time, typically with the magnitude of light received on the y axis and with time on the x axis. The light is usually in a particular frequ ...

with a period of 21.040 ± 0.001 hours. There are two brightness minima, having luminosity variations of 0.05 and 0.12 in

magnitude Magnitude may refer to: Mathematics *Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction *Magnitude (mathematics), the relative size of an object *Norm (mathematics), a term for the size or length of a vector *Order of ...

, respectively. In 2000, Michalak estimated Hestia to have a mass of 3.5 kg.(2000 mass estimate of 46 Hestia 0.018 / Mass of Ceres 4.75) * Mass of Ceres 9.43E+20 = 3.573E+18 Even though Hestia is only about 124 km in diameter, in 1997, Bange and Bec-Borsenberger estimated Hestia as having a mass of 2.1 kg, based on a

perturbation Perturbation or perturb may refer to: * Perturbation theory, mathematical methods that give approximate solutions to problems that cannot be solved exactly * Perturbation (geology), changes in the nature of alluvial deposits over time * Perturbatio ...

19 Fortuna Fortuna (minor planet designation: 19 Fortuna) is one of the largest main-belt asteroids. It has a composition similar to 1 Ceres: a darkly colored surface that is heavily space-weathered with the composition of primitive organic compounds, incl ...

.(Older mass estimate of Hestia 0.109 / Mass of Ceres 4.75) * Mass of Ceres 9.43E+20 = 2.163E+19 This older 1997 estimate would give it a density of 14+ g/cm³ and make Hestia more massive than several much larger asteroids.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hestia 000046 000046 Discoveries by N. R. Pogson Minor planets named from Greek mythology Named minor planets 000046 000046 18570816